Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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Gay now means rubbish. Get over it

Young people, eh? They’re always changing the meaning of words. When I was a youngster, “sick” meant ill; now it means good. “Ill” also means good, or more accurately doubly good – something is “ill” if it’s really cool. “Mad” is now used to mean lots – if someone has “mad style” that means they have lots of style, not that they look like Su Pollard circa 1985. In some subcultures, the meaning of the word “bare” has completely changed, too – once it meant uncovered, or basic and simple; now it means “lots and lots of stuff”. So if you go to someone’s house and see that they have loads of candles, you’d say they have “bare candles”. Weird, I know.

And these warped words are spreading from behind the bike sheds (or wherever schoolchildren hang out these days) into the mainstream worlds of work and everyday life. My brother, who’s 24, is a successful trader at a very respectable bank, and yet, having grown up in a somewhat grimy part of north London, he frequently uses the words listed above. “Did you drink a lot last night?” I’ll ask him. “Bare amounts,” he’ll reply.

Then there’s the word “gay”. Young people have changed the meaning of this word, too. Somewhat controversially, gay now means rubbish, or pathetic, or lame (another word whose meaning has changed – I’m just about old enough to remember when “lame” was used to refer to someone who couldn’t walk, before my generation started using it to mean rubbish).

Yesterday, the gay-rights group Stonewall launched a campaign to preserve the use of the word gay to mean homosexual rather than naff. It has designed posters aimed at schoolkids that say: “Gay: Let’s get the meaning straight.” It is fighting a losing battle. When youth culture starts fiddling with particular words, little can be done about it. Imagine if the General Medical Council launched a campaign to get schoolchildren to use the word “sick” properly – it would be laughed out of every school in the land and probably find itself branded “whack” (an American word for “bad”, now being imported by British youth, who of course can’t say “bad” anymore because bad means good). It’s the same with Stonewall – its schools campaign is unlikely to have much traction with yoof for whom gay now only means lame.

Very dubiously, Stonewall says young people’s use of the word gay to mean rubbish is homophobic. It describes it as “homophobic language”, claiming that phrases such as “that’s so gay” (to mean “that’s rubbish”) and “you’re so gay” (to mean “you’re so lame”) constitutes “homophobic bullying”. This is nonsense. Even Stonewall’s own report on the widespread use of the word gay in schools admits that “most of the time it is used unconsciously and without hurtful intent”. So how can it be homophobic? The word homophobic (unless its meaning has also changed?) means hatred for gays, often violent hatred; yet as Stonewall itself says, the use of the word gay to mean lame usually has no malevolent intent. In the vast majority of cases, this language is not directed at gay people, in order to make them feel inferior – it’s simply used to describe things. Most young people who say “that’s gay” are no more being homophobic than a person who uses the word “black” to mean depressing (“it was a black period in my life”) is being racist.

This is borne out by the fact that the rising use of the word “gay” to mean rubbish has coincided with increased levels of tolerance towards homosexuals among young people. When I was at school, we never used the word gay to mean rubbish, and yet there was a lot of anti-gay sentiment, reflecting broader anti-gay outlooks in politics and society. Today, the opposite is the case – kids are forever using the word gay to mean rubbish, yet real, genuinely prejudiced anti-gay sentiment is on the wane, both in schools and in society. A whopping 82 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds, some of whom will have used the word gay to mean naff (and perhaps still do), are in favour of gay marriage. Clearly the new use of the word gay does not speak to a prejudiced outlook – it simply speaks to the fact that words change meaning, and there’s not much we can do about it.

There’s a debate to be had over why the word gay specifically came to mean rubbish. My penny’s worth, as I’ve argued before, is that it’s because what is now presented to us as “gay culture” is often quite knowingly naff, camp, shallow stuff, leading young people who have been exposed to such culture through pop music and TV to associate “gay” with “rubbish”. But that’s a debate for another time. For now, we have to face up this fact: Gay now means rubbish. Get over it.